California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed a law requiring K-12 schools to provide gender-neutral bathrooms by July 2026.
The new law, Senate Bill 760, was among a series of laws signed by Newsom Saturday to expand protections for the state’s LGBTQ community.
“California is proud to have some of the most robust laws in the nation when it comes to protecting and supporting our LGBTQ+ community,” Newsom said in a statement.
Under the law, “each school district, county office of education, and charter school” would be required to have at least one gender-neutral bathroom on campus on or before July 1, 2026. The bathroom must be available for use during school hours and during school functions when students are present, the law states.
I went to a gender neutral restroom in California a couple months ago. Each toilet was in its own little private room, and there was a common area of sinks for hand washing. My only thought was that all public restrooms should be like that. Even apart from the equal access issue for LGBTQ+ people, why make one gender stand in line when there are unused facilities right next door.
Honestly, I just like the privacy anyways. Who wants to make eye contact with someone through the 1in gap in the stall doors?
I am passionate about gendered bathrooms. Sorry ladies, you take far too long to pee.
/s
Just wait until conservatives find out there are already gender neutral bathrooms in their own homes!
Oh the horror!
imagine thinking this is an own. Home bathrooms are made for one person at a time.
i never really got the whole separated toilets thing anyway, it’s a toilet, do your thing and skedaddle
My biggest reason for wanting separate bathrooms is the propensity for women to squat and spray the seat. I know guys can make a mess too but usually the women’s restroom is dirtier than men’s. Also women’s restroom is more likely to have a line.
But I’m sure building-wise it would be easier to just make one big bathroom so it should probably be that way, long as it’s big enough.
In areas with lots of people it’s also about efficiency. Single stall toilets don’t work at a train station. A better option is to have two toilets … one with urinal and one without. Use whichever one you want.
For efficiency just add a piss trough. It works great at ballparks and fairgrounds.
How do you have experience with both men and women’s restrooms?
Edit: ow the downvotes
Idk about them, but my transition experience was the opposite. Neither is free of animals who were never taught how to operate their bodies in a public space, but my men’s room experiences were gross way more often than my women’s room experiences are. And now that I share a single toilet bathroom with men at work again, piss in weird places all the time. I understand that there are some places where the women’s room is routinely worse, but the average has been the opposite in my experience.
I used to work in a restaurant so I’ve had to clean both.
Women are utterly disgusting. Men sometimes pee on the seats but women shit on the walls.
I was stunned the first time. After having it happen once a week or so, you really start to wonder WTF is wrong with women
because females don’t like going to the bathroom around men? Not really hard to understand
Disabled, my favorite gender
Disabled toilets are already gender neutral, I guess they’ll just stick another sign on the door?
only if they’re single-occupant bathrooms. which. for schools… are usually not going to be the case. personally, that should be the solution. just rip out both bathrooms, install single occupant cells. nobody cares what you are. the only sign needed is an ‘occupied’/‘vacant’ on the latch.
(edit: well, you’d still have to have a placard with braille on it so blind people can know what kind of room it is.)
Most of the disabled stalls I’ve encountered (at least in the US) are within the gendered bathrooms. So even if the stall is nominally gender neutral one first has to enter the men’s room or women’s room.
So much of the online bathroom discussion makes more sense when one realises that US public restroom designs are insane.
Yeah here in the good ol (hahahaha) USA most establishments have a separate “restroom” for men and women which consist of a row of sinks for washing up and a number of stalls for toilets (and urinals in men’s rooms of course).
Sometimes the urinals are just in a row on the wall with no dividers between. But there’s usually one or two disabled stalls as well, although they’re not locked in any way.
Do you know you can just buy those keys online?
I didn’t know this for years. So handy.
But be careful as people will ask staff for the key and open it on you haha
and you need a key
Why? It is already so invenient for people without disabilities to somewhere and ask for something, that for disabled it will be nearly-impossible.
It turns out, California is not part of the UK and your experience isn’t relevant.
